The Assay E-Book

Yvonne Green

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 38

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

"I like the way good food and diction go together so clearly... The poems are different to what one normally gets in English, the issues far bigger, as in 'Dhimmi Under Sharia Law' (A Lawyer's Poem) and in many others that one may benefit from." - Alan Sillitoe"These enthralling and lovely poems begin with rich recollections of another country ( so we ate, so we loved ), but darken into the shock of domestic violence. Her poems are absolutely straightforward to read, but quite unforgettable." - Alison Brackenbury"Yvonne Green takes us into the unfamilar world of Boukhara and Judeo Tajik culture with complete assurance. For all the lucidity of her poetry, her work has an unusual density. This is a fine new voice, which deserves to be widely heard." - Elaine Feinstein"Yvonne Green's poems are strange, evoking unfamiliar worlds and seeing them with their own kind of language. She effaces their merely subjective self and her poems get into their subjects. What matters is the voices out there, and she hears them. There is so much world, so many stories, included here. It is wonderful to encounter this vivid annex to experience and understanding." - Michael Schmidt

Leseprobe

The Assay

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the editors of the following, in which some of these poems and translations first appeared:

Areté, The Food Programme (BBC Radio 4), Brittle Star, Cimarron Review and Cumberland Poetry Review (USA), Dimui Review and Jerusalem Review (Israel), European Judaism, The Interpreter’s House, The Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, The London Magazine, Magma, Modern Poetry In Translation, The North, PEN International, Petits Propos Culinaires, PN Review, Poetry Review, Sameach, Second Light, The Sephardi Bulletin, The Wolf. ‘Knitting’ was commissioned by the Poetry Society and appears on their website at poetrysociety.org.uk/content/knit/week3.

The poems in the section ‘And for Years After’ were written for JWA Women’s Shelter

Published 2010 by

Smith|Doorstop Books

The Poetry Business

Campo House

54 Campo Lane

Sheffield S1 2EG

www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Copyright © Yvonne Green 2010

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-906613-17-4

eBook ISBN 978-1-912196-96-8

Yvonne Green hereby asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Utter

Cover design by Utter

Converted to ePub/Kindle by Inpress

Smith|Doorstop Books is a member of Inpress,

www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Distributed by NBN International, Airport Business Centre, 10 Thornbury Road Plymouth PL 6 7PP.

The Poetry Business gratefully acknowledges the help of Arts Council England.

Contents

Boukhara

Souriya

Basmati

Our Food

Joma

Doyra

Taking The Bride To The Henna Night

Boukharian Boys

Bivi

Jomi Hammam

Azzazel

Dhimmi

Binyamin

Meal Times

There’s A Different History

The Parents

Khundal Khon

And For Years After

That I May Know You

Amnesia

Walking The Boys To School

The First Time

Someone Else’s Story

I Didn’t Really Realise

We Speak English Now

Karen’s Story

And For Years After

I Am Not A Mother

The Assay

Ghetto Blaster

Car Keys

A Trial

The Prayer

Snakes And Whips

Col & Gil

The Assay

I Am Livid

There Is A Boat

Originating Summons

The Oboule In Alexandria circa 1935

My Father’s Room

Transgression

George’s Cabbeldy House

Lag B’Omer

Vigil

Originating Summons

Knitting

Mother Me Always

The Cemetery At St. Martin, Mauritius

Without Your Jews

To Mordechai

Translations from the Russian of Semyon Lipkin (1911-2003)

Charred

To Inna

Anthem

Moses

Mikhael

The Cossack Wife

Stopped

Moldavian is a Language

On a Blue Vase

Glossary

Notes

for my parents, Vicky (née Ribacoff) and Charles Mammon with love

IBoukhara

Souriya

‘My mother told me a long time ago

you can eat a mountain of salt with someone

and still you cannot know them.

I lived with Moshiach and Souriya

together in one house for forty years,

Mirka and I raised our daughters with them.

At our table we did not eat a mountain of salt.

Together we ate maybe this much.’

His hands and his mind’s eye reckoned out

a mound from his belly to his chin.

‘So how could I know what she would do to me?’

Basmati

I don’t measure the rice

I wash it in an ancient sieve

using my palm and the tips

of my fingers stroking towards

my belly and up and

then brushing away with

the back of my fingers, the rice

a caress on the knuckles

and a satisfying gravel

on the flat of my hand

the cold water cooling

my pulse like eau de cologne

the suggestion of fragrance

promising from the lifeless

wetting grains

my left hand dreaming

on the sieve handle

shuffling the sieve

like a wallah working a fan

the metal strips

of the handle loop pressed into

my dry palm

two different rhythms one dry and hard

and one too cold now

and lively with rice back and forth

back and forth

Our Food

The smell of rice cooking is the smell of my childhood

and a house devoid of cooking smells is no home.

Sometimes I visited other houses which smelled like our house

heavy with the steaming of mint or dill

and tiny cubes of seared liver all seeping into rice,

which would become green and which was called bachsh.

We felt foreign, shy of our differentness

unable to explain the sweetness of brown rice called osh sevo,

where prunes and cinnamon and shin meat had baked slowly

melting into the grains of rice which never lost their form.

Our eggs, called tchumi osh sevo, were placed in water

with an onion skin and left to coddle overnight

so that their shells looked like dark caramel

their flesh like café au lait.

Our salad was chopped,

a woman appraised her refinement by how fast